Spartan-S63

That would be a horrendous waste of money. The program cost coupled with two launches would make it one of the most expensive (if not the most) programs in history. Might as well pack up NASA and never revisit publicly funded manned spaceflight again.

Good news is that after 1.2 hits, the fuel flow settings might allow you to ditch all the fuel ducts around the tank. We'll see if it works though.

One of the things to try to replicate the roll program is to make sure you're using SRBs with gimbals and only use the SRB gimbals to execute the roll. Using any of the SSMEs modifies the torque on the vehicle and causes you to deviate from other axes. This also requires that your SRBs produce much more thrust their your SSMEs.

Any chance this is being added (or has already been added) to CKAN?

Yes, it is. I don't think it really matters though because the rotation tools can flip it around in the VAB/SPH.

Just flip it around so the attachment node is faced towards the Mk3 cockpit.

It's going to be this one: I use it too and it's a pretty great IVA overhaul for the Mk3 cockpit.

By chance, do you use the SSMEs for the roll program or do you do it some other way? I remember hearing on someone's stream that the SRB gimbals execute the roll program on the actual shuttle and that's why it didn't deviate too far from its velocity vector when rolling. On lift off, the SRBs generated the most thrust. The SSMEs existed on liftoff to make sure the torque on the vehicle due to the offset CoM was essentially zero.

That's the best you're going to get it. It's fine so long as you're flying straight and level. As soon as you start rolling to turn, you start inducing a side slip. If you rotate the vehicle in the SPH and look at the CoM and CoL placement, you'll see that the center of lift acts differently when the vehicle is no longer belly-down. There's really no good solution to the issue. It's mostly just being gentle with the controls and understanding what your flight characteristics are.

It's not an issue of my nose wheel, it's actually when my main gear touchdown, the spring compression ends up bouncing me back into the air a good 50 meters or so. Maybe I'm not slowing myself enough for touchdown that it bounces me back into the air and I continue gliding. Again, I'm touching down around ~100 m/s. I typically try to stay above that because any air speed below and I have a hard time raising my nose again. Then again, I'm typically pitching at greater than 10 degrees on touchdown which is pretty steep for main gear touchdown.

I'm really excited to see the possibility of a split-rudder being included in this mod pack. In the past, when I've tried to do this through mirroring the tail, I've ended up weird situations where control surface reversal would end up deploying the rudder in the same direction, inducing a massive yaw, and resulting in a flat spin. It's really frustrating and I'm sure it's a mod conflict. To see a part that supports it out of the box should fix the issue and seeing it deployed via action group is awesome too. I love this mod, thanks for all your hard work! Also, does anyone have any advice on how to solve the issue where the landing gear are extremely bouncy? I keep having the issue of touching down and then bouncing back up into the air pretty high. I've tried adjusting the spring and damper but I don't really understand how they work well enough to fix the issue. I'm also touching down around ~100 m/s which is pretty fast to be going. Any less and I have a hard time pulling my nose up. I'm using FAR, by the way.

Excellent, I'm definitely checking this out! Edit: Checked it out. Wow, your TWR on the shuttle is ridiculously high. There's no issue with that, but I totally underestimated how aggressive my gravity turn should be. That thing flies like a bat out of hell, wow! Perchance, did you do "drop tests" with your shuttle orbiter to test the glide characteristics? If so, did you build a shuttle carrier? And if you did that, how'd you build it? I'm still having trouble making my shuttle a sub-assembly that I can attach to a larger jet-propelled aircraft or whatnot. Any advice would be awesome!

Yeah, you should definitely roll and pitch up once your above most of the atmosphere. The torque pushing your nose up is favorable versus the alternative of pushing your nose down. That said, I'm still working on mastering the roll maneuver without introducing yaw or pitch.

For balancing the main engines, I use Kerbal Engineer and continue rotating them until I get as close to zero torque as possible. The mod shows you how much torque is created by the offset thrust. Also, draining fuel from the bottom first and then the top (which I haven't quite figured out yet) will help you when it comes to keeping the stack balanced as you drain fuel. You want to keep your CoM as high as possible for as long as possible so the thrust vector doesn't have to be too terribly far off center. It also helps to drain the bottom fuel tanks if you don't need them for deltaV.

I haven't fixed this problem yet, but I would imagine using something like RCS Build Aid, you could balance the RCS by adding a few more thrusters around the body of the craft to make sure that no weird torque (I think?) is being applied while using the built-in RCS thrusters.

Biggest thing I'm waiting on is the update to Space Shuttle Engines and gimbal trim (it'd be nice to have a plugin that points your gimbal through CoM by default, too) and the adjustable landing gear. I find the stock landing gear too springy. There's not enough dampening (I think) when I touch down. Even less than 150 m/s touchdown (faster because of FAR), bounces me back into the air even though I don't have the speed to generate adequate lift to stay airborne.

My orbiter vehicle (which looks similarly designed to yours) is successful at up to 40 degree nose-up on reentry using FAR (different aero models could be the culprit) which is nice for quick deceleration. I'm still figuring out where to put my periapsis to land back at the KSC, though.

I could maybe take a look for you. I'm not super experienced with CFGs, but I've written some module manager patches for personal use before. I'll take a look into migrating KM_Gimbal over to the stock gimbal and see what else needs to be done.

I'd take a craft of the whole thing. I should have all the mods installed that you use (I have a ton installed right now). In one of your pictures on the runway, it looks like you have flaps enabled on your control surfaces. Does that mean you're using FAR?

Is that a single wing piece? That looks amazing with the B9 procedural wings.

My problem with this idea is that half the time, I end up with control surface reversal and the two rudders deploy the same direction or opposite directions from what I expect. I do fly with FAR as well, so maybe that's the cause of it. But either way, I occasionally get control surface reversal (even landing gear reversal) that's really really weird and usually causes me to lose control in atmosphere. I would love a split-tail Big-S tail part, if possible. It would definitely be a great way to slow down in FAR. The biggest issue is that the shuttle's profile doesn't generate enough drag without flaps or air brakes. Having a split tail would definitely help that.

Awesome. This is the thing I'm missing the most. Let me know if I can help in any way. I'd be happy to write module configs if need be. I love this parts pack and have been missing it in 1.1. The fuel tanks are amazing for shuttle building.

Looks to me like a symmetry issue with the control surface wings. The aerodynamics appear to work fine but the animations are off. How bizarre.

I'm sure OP will list it on CKAN when it's ready. In the mean time, wait patiently for them to finish fixing/changing the mod.

Any desire for additional testers. I'd gladly donate some of my time to help you test out the new parts if you'd like.